Thursday is the New Friday

Today was a very light day at work. Shado was in the process of updating the forums to the new phpBB, so I the day felt to grind away even slower. And the nature of most of the calls were just really relaxed. In every respect, it felt like a Friday. Which was good – I was dead tired.

I was dead tired picking up Clara. I was dead tired while she was bopping around the living room. I was dead tired when D walked through the door, looking dead tired as well. We decided at that point that we were going out to eat, and after a little bit of discussion, we decided to try out the Denny’s just off the highway nearby.

Our history with Denny’s franchises in San Antonio is bittersweet. We went to one at 3am the night we got married to get away from the hotel for a while and just be together. We’ve also gone as a family and had it take nearly an hour to get our appetizers. Service has always been more often a miss than a hit. So my expectations were a little low, but I didn’t much care – just didn’t want to have to cook. We got a seat in a more or less empty dining room, and right away, the waitress was very attentive. It set the tone for a very relaxing dinner out, which just doesn’t happen with a toddler. She brought us some complimentary dinner rolls to keep the kids in check, started a fresh pot of coffee for D and constantly kept my tea topped off. With the kids quiet, we just kinda chilled to the smooth jazz playing and ate at a leisurely pace. It was an excellent experience for a change, and we’ll likely be visiting that one again soon.

The job D was going to apply for tonight had been unposted, but she took the opportunity, while she was still in the job search mindset, to go out and apply for a few jobs. I decided to do a little inbox cleaning – deleted old emails I no longer needed and clean up some junk mail. I then checked my other accounts: the ones I do my job search for. And there it was. I’d been interviewing with an IT consulting company for a few weeks now, and they emailed me an offer letter. It was for considerably more than I’m making now, and it included all the benefits, vacation and perks I’ve wanted – most available from day one. I signed it and emailed it back to them. I’ll put in my notice for my current position in the morning. Very excited!

Tomorrow is Friday, but since today felt like Friday, I wonder if it’s gonna feel like I’m working on Saturday. -.- I’m trying to get a swift belt run going, but if I can’t, I’ll probably just fish until Einherjar starts. Needless to say, I’ll be having some celebratory drinks, too. :D

Carp Diem

There are several kinds of “hard days at work” when you work at a service desk. There’s the “Take large amounts of flak from management” day. There’s the “Spend three hours on the phone on the same issue” day. There’s the “I’m a bigwig and messed something up big time or forgot something important and need it fixed yesterday” day. And then there’s the “I, like, keep my job the same way I passed the 10th grade (-.^) and now I, like, need your, like, help?” day. -.- I had this kind of day today. They are tiring in that they are an extreme test of mental endurance, patience and politeness. While I understand that each problem is frustrating for the customer, sometimes I wonder why we don’t test for basic computer skills. Ya know, things like finding the print button to print? Clicking the OK button to OK something? Doesn’t sound like it would be too hard, but a few hours of these shenanigans can really make you wonder about the future of humanity.

I just couldn’t buckle down tonight and study – my mind already was fried out from work. Instead, I hung out with D and watched her play a little FF8 until Colin went to bed. After he was in bed, D decided to learn how to play Halo and joined me for the first mission. I was surprised that she even tried it, but even more surprised that she actually did rather well for not playing FPS’s at all. She had a hard time navigating and coordinating the look/move system at first, but she did just fine after the first couple of hallways.

Lastly, notice something different along the right side? Moat carp count missing? Something crossed out? After nearly three years, I’ve finally completed Joulet’s “The Competition” quest and got my Testimonial and Lu Shang’s Rod. If the FNLE I’m trying to get off the ground doesn’t, I know what I’ll be doing on Friday before Einherjar. :D

Wyvern = Guud! Lizardman = Baed!

Kinda a rough day at work today. Not going into specifics, but it has to do with doing too many other peoples’ jobs for them and getting in trouble for me doing one of their jobs wrong. -.- When I got home, I sat down to play some Xbox and Clara came up to me. I really wasn’t in the mood, but she shoved my arms out of the way, crawled up into my lap and just sat there. Normally she’ll try to take the controller away from me, eject the disc tray on the Xbox, or change the channel on the TV or turn it off and on repeatedly, but not this time. She just wanted to spend some quiet time snuggling with daddy.

That calmed me down a little bit. D got home and I vented to her a little. I feel bad because I know she didn’t have the greatest day either, but she was very attentive to me nonetheless. I had dinner practically ready when she got home, so we ate up quickly, played with Clara a bit, and got her ready for bed before static started.

I decided to try out a new camp in static tonight. There are some very squishy wyvern pets just outside a ruins exit – where we have been camping. When we got kills, they were VERY good experience. But just because the targets were squishy didn’t mean the walls guarding them were. Of the four pulls we made, two of them involved linking some rather nasty Mamool Ja, causing a swift and painful death. We decided to go back to our rat rounds – back to the drawing board…

At least we still had enough time to level and skill up. I got to eat the scroll of Stonega III that had been sitting gathering dust in my storage for nearly a year now. I think we all capped dark magic skill and I’m about .5 from capping elemental as well. It’s kinda funny: we all know that for the first 5k of the next level is skill-up time. The kills slow down to a crawl, but we don’t have to worry about falling behind where we should be. Some competition showed up in the form of someone with a history for mob-stealing and MPK, so we avoided him until it was time to call it a night.

I decided, before hitting the hay for the night, to check the moat carp market and see what else I could get. To my surprise, there were 20-something stacks on sale, and I bought all of them for a decent price. Then I went to San d’Oria and got a few there and bought some from a bazaar by the moat carp NPC. It wasn’t enough to finish, though… I’m at 9942/10000… 58 fish to go – that’s 4 stacks and 10 singles. I’m so nerve-wrackingly close, but I’m not gonna pay 3k for a stack of fish. 2500 is expensive enough. I’ve been working on this quest off and on for over 3 years, one more night won’t hurt me. I can wait for tomorrow after my studies to finish.

Speaking of tomorrow, there’s a Dynamis – Windurst going down. As much as I’d like to be there in case a Monster Helm drops, I have to study and finish this chapter if I want to play on Friday. I also have to poke my wife into doing her exercising. She’s really enjoying it once she gets going – it’s the “get going” part that is hard for her.

Goblin Love

Today was the pilot launch of the new intranet portal at work today. Everyone at the desk was bunkered in for a hectic day: two support analysts from portal, big cups of coffee and breakfast tacos were brought in to keep everyone content. It actually wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Most people that called in were wanting to leave feedback, something that is easily deflected to the feedback email address designed for just such an event.

I spent the greater part of the evening studying my Cisco materials while D was exercising upstairs. I’m still in the Introduction to the Cisco IOS chapter. I was reading a large chunk of the chapter that didn’t require any work in the router. Then I got to a part of the book that said, “If you’ve been reading all this time with a router on and ready for you, your router has probably timed out by now.” I look up and just then I get a time-out notice. Gooooood book. XD I got in a little bit of DDR while D went to go shower, then I logged in to get some fish turned in. I’m now less than 400 fish away from completion. I also won the Chocobo Hot Cold Game out in Altepa and got a 5 Chocobuck slip, Mahogany Bed, an X-Potion +1, a Parasite worm and a bunch of greens. Lastly, I completed the Bastok [S] quest that included the gnole claw I got from Friday. The reward: “Jeunoan Currency. Untracable” 10k Gil :P

I read a little more about he Bastok [S] storyline: it’s filled with intrigue. Almost makes me wish I would have signed on with them. Almost. One of the rewards for a quest in that story thread is an adaman ingot, the most expensive part of the new gobbie bag quests, so it’s definitely something I’m going to work on soon.

Static tomorrow. It feels like it’s been forever since we partied, but it was only the end of last week. Tomorrow is also April Fool’s Day. I’ve found some reason or another to stay home on this day for the past 3 years, and I generally avoided this day altogether most my life. I can’t afford to stay home tomorrow, though, so I hope my day is kind to me…

Weekend Intelligence: Grand Central Station

The weekend always feels so short, but especially after a 3-day weekend followed by a full work week. Sometimes it feels like there’s just barely enough time to recover and get everything taken care of before I’m back in the workweek. So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights!

House and Home:

We didn’t do much of anything Friday night beside celebrate the beginning of the weekend. We’ve both been so busy the past week that the opportunity to just goof off for an evening was too good to pass up. We did our FNLE while Colin and one of his friends (the 12 year old whose voice has already dropped) hung out and played the 360 upstairs.

Saturday was the usual big chore day. This time, our target was the upstairs rooms and laundry. Colin and Clara’s rooms got a clean sweep, and we pushed through 5 loads of laundry and made a dent in our own room. Later that evening, I decided to try to get a little bit of studying in while doing some laundry while D tried to lay down for a nap. Clara has hit her terrible two’s stage full-stride: she is into absolutely everything, wants everything her way and will begin tantrums at the drop of a hat when something isn’t right. I just couldn’t do what I wanted to do while she was up and around. I sat her to watch some TV while I folded some clothes, but she worked her way to my laptop while I was logged into one of my routers and started mashing keys. Before I could do anything about it, she had written something into the active session of the router and everything I had been doing to that point was hosed up. x.X D thought it was funny and decided to take pictures. I was not so amused. After dinner, we played in-game for a while and had ourselves a carefree night. -.^

Maybe it was payback for a great Saturday night, but Sunday was half over when we started it. I hate sleeping so late that we miss church. The dog hadn’t been let out, Colin had started surrounding himself with trash, toys and drink cups while firmly planted in front of the TV and Clara had apparently already been up, played in her room and decided to lay back down for an afternoon nap. -.-; It wasn’t long after we got the day jumpstarted that the doorbell started ringing off wall with Colin’s friends. Somewhere in the midst of answering the door and the steady stream of Sunday night phone calls, I had found time to setup a play area for Clara and get dinner in the oven. Colin and company eventually left to go outside and play, leaving D and I to our Dynamis – Xarcabard run without much more interruption. If only…

His friends were still stopping by. At one point, D was hollering upstairs for Colin (who had already left) to come answer the door when she banged her pinky toe on a baby toy and collapsed in a heap to the floor. I was on the phone with my parents, the dog was barking at the visitor at the door, the baby was crying and trying to climb on my huddled and, now crying, wife and the yahoo kid at the door was still waiting for the absent Colin. I told the child that Colin wasn’t here, went to hold Clara while giving support to my wife and put the dog in the kennel. All I wanted to do was relax! Bedtime for Clara on Sunday involves giving her a bath first, so I got the bath started and her all washed up, then traded places with D so neither one of us were AFK for too long.

About halfway into D’s shift, Colin came home crying. Apparently, Colin is friends with two brothers, who thought that teaming up and throwing rocks and sticks at the other team would make a great game. The older brother started taunting Colin, calling the books he reads and the characters in them “stupid.” Woo. I wonder how long it took him to come up with that one. So Colin decided to hit his younger brother in the face with a stick… Filled to the brim with genuine 100% “WTH?” His older brother responded by hitting Colin in the back with a rock and threatening him with a saw blade. All children involved ran home crying to their moms.

Why are children such savages? I’m seriously considering at this point how much I can get for the pair of them on the black markets of Bangladesh when D comes downstairs and gets the scoop from Colin. He tried to defend what he did by saying he was “provoked.” We quickly corrected that shenanigans – just because you are provoked doesn’t mean you have to choose to hit someone. There’s always a choice. We had to make yet another extended AFK in the middle of our run, take Colin down to his friends’ house, have him apologize for hitting him in the face with a stick and talk to their parents about their sons’ propensity for brutality. Once we get home, we send Colin upstairs to get ready for his bath, and lo and behold, the doorbell rings again and this time, it’s the older brother, come to apologize. AFK again, everyone is friends again, and Colin gets in the bath.

In-game:

Friday night was FNLE in the past. Several people had their eyes set on some of the new items dropped by popped notorious monsters in the past. In particular, Bloodlapper drops a pair of gloves that would be very nice for the BLM army. Pretty much a poor man’s Zenith Mitts. And the pop items for it are rather easy to get. The hardest part is getting far enough into Castle Oztroja [S] to get to the mobs that drop the item. There were a ton of us, so we easily got there and started mopping up the Yags. It wasn’t long before we had a pop item for everyone that wanted one and more. LS call went out that anyone who wanted a pair of these gloves better get out there and get one. Kitiara decided to come out for the fun, too. Unlike E and Emma’s first encounter with the bug, the fight was ridiculously easy with an alliance. We were there popping them and getting gloves for about 2 hours and went 5/6 on pops – all the BLM army that were there that wanted one got a pair of gloves. I think the drop rate is somewhere around 90% with treasure hunter effect. We also went to Jugner Forest [S] to pop a gnole NM, but that one was nowhere near as easy, nearly took out the alliance and didn’t even drop the item. I heard they had a hell of a time getting that pop item, too. All that death and no item, might be a while before we do that fight again, and we might have to devote a whole FNLE to farming/popping. I finished off the night by turning in more fish. I’m getting crazy close to that rod now. One or two more weekends should do the trick, and I think I have enough gil for it.

We didn’t get on much on Saturday – too busy with the house. I’d been doing a lot of thinking lately about whether I should keep MNK as my main or change to WHM. For me to do anything more with MNK would involve an ENORMOUS amount of time and/or gil investment. I just don’t have that, so after much consideration, I decided on Saturday to make the change to main WHM. When we did get online, we decided to help out in sea. We popped two Ix’MNKs, a Jailer of Temperance, and two Jailers of Hope, along with a bunch of pointable pop items. I was very tempted to lot the Temperance Axe that dropped for BST, but I decided against it and opted to stay in positive points.

Sunday’s in game time was spent in Dynamis – Xarcabard. It is such a tight balancing act to get any game time in while the children are awake, but if the only time we got was while they were asleep, we wouldn’t get any time at all… The kids were particularly bonkers, as I’ve already related, which lead to several AFK moments during some rather dicey pulls. Luckily, we were available and ready for Dynamis Lord, who we took down handily for the first time in almost a year. Nothing spectacular dropped off him, unfortunately, but it sure felt good to know that we could still do it. At the end of the run, Cleric’s Mitts dropped, so I was thankful I kept my points positive from the night before. I’m now 4/5 on WHM, all I need are the pants from Jeuno and I’ll have 5/5 on WHM.

Tomorrow is study night. I moved all my routers and switches to my desk in the office, so I don’t have to worry about Clara haxing my tables again. This way, I can set up a play area downstairs while D is upstairs exercising on DDR uninterrupted and unhindered. Might even be able to finish my chapter and take the test for it. We’ll see.